PodCastle

* Author : JL George
* Narrator : Jordan Price Williams
* Host : Matt Dovey
* Audio Producer : Devin Martin
*
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Previously published by Fireside


Rated R
Diamonds and Pearls
by JL George
 
Diamonds are two a penny, but everybody wants them anyway.
At first, Osian thinks it’s because they hurt. Every time he speaks a new word in the common tongue and a diamond comes up, it feels like dying, like its hard angles will tear his throat open. Something you have to suffer for like that, you hold on to. You want to believe it’s worth something.
On the other hand, once you’ve brought it up, wiped away the blood and sucked on a lozenge to soothe the soreness, you can pretend a diamond didn’t come out of you at all. It’s such a sharp, mineral thing. Pearls are different — stubbornly organic. They roll out of the throat with ease, sticky only with saliva, and they come with the old tongue. Rounded, with a dull shine, they look like a product of the flesh.
At the end of each week, Mrs. Toms has the class empty out their handfuls of diamonds onto their desks, with a bar of chocolate or a book token for whoever has the most. The stones spill everywhere, and the classroom becomes a cold, bright place, an ocean of diamonds whose images glitter behind Osian’s eyelids when he blinks.
They don’t count up the pearls. Some of the other kids have strings of them, pale shimmering legacies from grandparents, worn discreetly beneath their school shirts. Osian doesn’t. Grandmother never passed the old tongue down. Her knuckles were rapped when she spoke it in school, and later, friends would hesitantly say, Well, I suppose we have to move with the times, and You want your kids to get good jobs, don’t you? and What’s the point?
Still, he acquires a few pearls, here and there. They’re swear words, mostly, whispered covertly behind hands and bike sheds, and disgorged in secret, too. He keeps them in a wooden box on his nightstand, another relic from his grandmother.
One lunchtime, Mrs. Toms catches them at it: him and Ceri-Ann from next door, whispering rude words in a corner of the playground, rolling the spit-sticky pearls between their fingers. There aren’t rules against it anymore, not officially, but he still flushes with shame when she walks over.
She frowns down at them, face pinched and disapproving, and Osian’s stomach drops. They were swearing, after all. How is he going to explain the detention to Mam?
But Mrs. Toms just shakes her head, sighs, and says, “Haven’t you children got better things to do with your time?”
She walks away and starts to clean her glasses on the hem of her cardigan, and Osian realises with a sudden thrill that she didn’t understand what they were saying. She doesn’t speak the old tongue.
It’s like having a secret power. At the table that night, Mam asks him what he looks so excited about, and he clamps his lips shut and shakes his head, knowing that the scrutiny of his parents will spoil it, will make this precious thing mundane and useless and no longer his. He reaches into his pocket and lets the pearls roll between his fingers, a small, rattling handful of reassurances.
The problem is, what do you do with a secret like this one? Swearing behind Mrs Toms’s back is funny — although a couple of times, he and Ceri-Ann get kept in at lunchtime for giggling too loudly even though she can’t understand them — but what else?